Please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your artistic practice.

I'm an artist based in the central belt of Scotland and I just graduated from the Glasgow School of Art this summer, I'm on my own for the first time since taking art seriously and that's a lot less scary than I thought it would be. I'm a multi-media artist and I make work about queer embodiment, I mostly paint with acrylic and make films/video, though I've recently branched off into sculpture as well. I find it really important to do a lot of different things at once to create a larger body of work, I get bored easily and spiral if I stay attached to one medium for too long, having range means I'm forced to look at the big picture and then indulge in smaller tasks. I work with a lot of queer theory and writing when making my work, Susan Stryker and Leslie Feinberg being some of my go to's. A lot of my work has been about queer monstrosity and reclaiming the monster in one way or another, typical figures like the vampire, werewolf, Frankensteins monster and so on, and I'm looking to expand further on that.

You describe your work as ‘repulsive and attractive, funny and alarming, cheeky but deadly serious’ – why are these contradictions important to you?

Contradictions are one of the main driving forces within my work, I rarely find anything in life to be definitive and unchanging, especially people and bodies. My work stems from my own experience in the world and the reactions and exchanges that I've had because of that, and while a lot of what I pull from is negative, I wouldn't go back and change those experiences. They were miserable but integral to my optimism and perseverance, which is really what my work is about at its core. That in itself is contradictory. Our perceptions of people are contradictory depending on the space they inhabit at the time and our own backgrounds, someone can be the pinnacle of sex and attraction to one person and a monster to another. A woman in one room and a man in another, this is extremely interesting, upsetting and charged. Politics give me a lot to work with obviously. Its fun to play with something that has often made me miserable. My subject matter is negative and difficult so I find it really important personally to have it be 'fun' in some capacity, whether that be the final outcome or the process, its all contradictory somehow.

Who (or what) inspires your work?

I am deeply inspired by painters like Ken Currie and Isidre Nonell, I love figurative painting it never gets boring for me, especially when it's dark and rich. I keep coming back to Greer Lanktons dolls and especially her photography of said dolls, she's probably my favourite artist at the moment and is who has inspired me to get into sculpture, I just love strange bodies and personalities. I'm also very inspired by horror/fantasy films and media in general, I love a man-made creature no matter how shitty the makeup or practical effects, the shittier the better! Creatures and monsters have always been something I've fixated on from a young age.

ANIMA/ asks artists to think about the post-, non-, semi-, and trans- human animal – what does animality mean to you and where do you see yourself within this category?

Animality, to me, is about authenticity. We often think of humans as separate to animals, something unrelatable, but animality to me just means our instincts, natural bodies and innate behaviours. Being hairy, horny, hungry is innate to the human-animal experience, and yet they are often shunned behaviours and embodiments depending on who you are in society. I'm a human-animal, I try not to engage in hierarchy, I feel my urge to create is a primal one and thus an animal one. Some animals create nests, some animals create butthole-teeth paintings.

I find the werewolf is an interesting figure as it toes the line between extreme agency and a lack of it. The werewolf is physically powerful and un-beholden to the laws of polite society, yet, their body and psyche transforms without their consent or control. Do you see the werewolf as more of a sympathetic figure, or one of empowerment?

For me the werewolf is a sympathetic figure, and in it being sympathetic it is empowering to use as a muse. My sympathy towards the werewolf means accepting it entirely, the good and the bad, and finding common ground with it. I know what it's like to watch my own body transform against my own will and I know what it's like to have it change in ways that I do enjoy and have that be viewed negatively by others. I think a lot of people can relate to that, and thus relate to the werewolf, I think that's why we have kept coming back to this monster for centuries and maybe why it is so scary and enticing. 

Could you tell us about the works you’ll be showing at ANIMA/ 01 and how they came into being?

My works for ANIMA/01 were made in my final year at GSA and I ended up exhibiting them at my degree show but in a different format. I was never really sure about this painting, especially at the time, but I had a lot of mixed reactions to it which is exactly what I wanted and its shifted my opinions of it. I wanted to make something a bit naughtier, more crude, and a bit less 'obvious' if that makes sense. As for the arms, I really wanted to make some three dimensional and more manually intensive. They were originally made with cinema seats in mind, they crept out of the curtains as you sat and watched my short film, bringing the monster from off the screen and onto your shoulder. I've been wanting to bring them into other contexts, sort of Robert Gober 'Untitled leg' style, playing with where the monster is protruding from, perhaps physically impossible spaces to add to the uncanny. ANIMA/01 has been a great opportunity for that exploration.

Who (or what) is your favourite monster?

It's hard to choose, but I'd say werewolves are my day one favourite, vampires are up there but they don't scare me like werewolves do, I used to watch 'Werewolf/vampire' transformation spells on YouTube when I was very, very young with very high hopes. I love kelpies a lot aswell, they are truly scary to me, Scottish mythology is very deeply unnerving and so interesting, being told these stories as a child will always stick with me.